Uncertainty and the Ethics of Clinical Trials

A probabilistic explication is offered of equipoise and uncertainty in clinical trials. In order to be useful in the justification of clinical trials, equipoise has to be interpreted in terms of overlapping probability distributions of possible treatment outcomes, rather than point estimates representing expectation values. Uncertainty about treatment outcomes is shown to be a necessary but insufficient condition for the ethical defensibility of clinical trials. Additional requirements are proposed for the nature of that uncertainty. The indecisiveness of our criteria for cautious decision-making under uncertainty creates the leeway that makes clinical trials defensible.     

A note on the deontic system DL of Jones and Pörn

I would like to thank Ingmar Pörn for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

Can the Dead be Brought into Disrepute?

Queen Christina of Sweden was unconventional in her time, leading to hypotheses on her gender and possible hermaphroditic nature. If genetic analysis can substantiate the latter claim, could this bring the queen into disrepute 300 years after her death? Joan C. Callahan has argued that if a reputation changes, this constitutes a change only in the group of people changing their views and not in the person whose reputation it is. Is this so? This paper analyses what constitutes change and draws out the implications to the reputation of the dead. It is argued that a reputation is a relational property which can go through changes. The change is “real” for the group changing their views on Queen Christina and of a Cambridge kind for the long dead queen herself. Cambridge changes result in new properties being acquired, some of which can be of significance. Although the dead cannot go through any non-relational changes, it is possible for the dead to change properties through Cambridge changes. In this sense changes in reputation do affect the dead, and thus Queen Christina can acquire a new property, in this case possibly a worse reputation.     

Relation of mobility-fixity to the interpretation of pictorial stimuli

A group of 61 students who had previously (in 1986) been classified by Hansson, Rydén, and Johnsson in terms of perceptual fixity-mobility using a "free" Rod-and-Frame Test, were investigated regarding their interpretations of a nonfigurative stimulus shown repetitively at short exposure-times, and their characterization of two pictures each portraying two soldiers in intensive interaction--one man apparently attacking the other in the first picture and apparently rescuing or taking care of the other man in the second. Mobile subjects on the free Rod-and-Frame Test reported a larger number of different interpretations of the nonfigurative stimulus and construed it more frequently in terms of human themes than did the fixed subjects; in rating the pictures of soldiers, they used more extreme and complex characteristics. It appeared that, when confronted with ambiguous stimuli, the mobile individual moves both "horizontally", as it were, along the surface of objective reality, and "vertically", from present to past realities, thus conjoining subjective-emotional and objective-analytic aspects of perception. This interpretation agrees with Werner's model of mobility-fixity which implies that the mobile individual operates on different developmental levels of perceptual functioning.